A few years back, there was a minor flurry of worry about how scientists at the Brookhaven National Laboratory in New York were doing experiments that might destroy the Earth. The lab has a particle accelerator, a device designed to (duh) accelerate particles. They smash the subatomic critters together, and watch what happens. A lot of insight into nature comes out of such things, and labs such as Brookhaven have greatly increased our knowledge.

Well, some folks were concerned that the Mad Scientists at Brookhaven might accidentally create a black hole, which would then fall into the Earth, and eat it up atom by atom. Eventually the entire planet would get munched by the black hole, and we’d all die.

At the time, I thought this was silly. No scientist would ever do such a thing! They’d never get another grant.

Closeup of a black hole

Well, this has turned up again. A scientist at Brookhaven has speculated that a recent experiment might just have created a black hole. Now, my knowledge of the particular experiment in question is limited to that article I just linked, so don’t go asking me about quantum tunneling phase dispersive chronosynclastic infundibula. The stuff I study tends to be quite a bit bigger than your average neutron.

But I suspect that there are plenty of otherwise mundane explanations to the puzzling results of the Brookhaven experiment outlined in that news article. Not that I know what they are. But I’d just love to be near a water cooler at Brookhaven right now. I can imagine what they’re chatting about.

Was a black hole created? I don’t know. But if there was, I am not terribly concerned. For one thing, higher-energy particles than what they do at Brookhaven hit the Earth relatively often. If these created black holes, and they were dangerous, the Earth would have been toast a few billion years ago. The fact that we are still here attests to this being benign. How many people do you know who have been killed by a quantum black hole?

Also, black holes this tiny evaporate before they can do any damage. Evaporate, you say? I thought they only got bigger! Well, read this, or read this, if you dig equations and higher-level stuff. Or just Google "Hawking radiation".

Still and all, I also expect two things: 1) lots of email about this, and 2) the anti-science websites will go nuts. "We’re alllll gonna diiiiieeee!" So I’ll ask it again: How many people do you know who have been killed by a quantum black hole?

I don’t know of any, and I know lots of people who study black holes. So don’t panic. If and when scientists can create a real black hole in the lab, you wont hear about it on silly anti-science websites. You’ll hear about it on some silly scientist’s blog.

I don’t know, but the idea of creating a black hole in a lab is interesting… And think of the upcoming products! “Black hole vacuum cleaner”! If they would market these, I could clean my bedroom in no time! Sure, I’d have no bedroom left after it’s done, but it would be clean!

He explains the background and has a nice question and answer list. The short, short version is that some ideas in String/Brane theory suggest gravity at very short distances or very high energies could be much stronger than predicted in the Standard Model. By the Standard Model, it would be impossible to create a black hole with anything we could build. But with the new theories, it might just be possible. It would evaporate by Hawking radiation almost immediately, which is apparently what the BBC article says is being observed.

I would note that if this is a real discovery, it would be the first observation of Hawking radiation. If we could actually reach energies that exceeded that of the extreme high energy particles hitting Earth, I’d have some concern, regardless of current theory. Since we can’t, I don’t see any reason to be worried.

I’ve read about this in the webnews of german tech magazine publisher Heise.

However my first thought was: You loosers, I’ve a block hole in my bathroom since years. But somehow it has specialized in sucking single sox, but I’m still not sure if this singularity is a bug or a feature of my washing machine 😉

I’m a litle disappointed that you didn’t read the draft article that this high-level news article was based on:http://arxiv.org/PS_cache/hep-th/pdf/0501/0501068.pdf
If the author (Horatiu Nastase) is correct, this has large implications for the testability of string theory.